← The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos
The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos
Dr Laurie Talks Romance, Parents and Stalking on 'Love Factually'
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- [00:01]
Ben Walter
The Unshakeables podcast is kicking off Season two with an episode you won't want to miss. Join host Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business, as he welcomes a very special Guest, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Hear about the challenges facing small businesses and some of the oh moments Jamie has overcome. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:24]
Jamie Dimon
Chase Mobile app is available for select mobile devices.
- [00:27]
Ben Walter
Message and data rates May apply.
- [00:29]
Jamie Dimon
Chase JPMorgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC.
- [00:33]
Ben Walter
Copyright 2025 JP Morgan Chase & Co.
- [00:37]
Dr. Laurie Santos
The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. As Amica says, empathy is our best policy. That's why they'll go above and beyond to tailor your insurance coverage to best fit your needs. Whether you're on the road, at home or traveling along life's journey, their friendly and knowledgeable representatives will work with you to ensure you have the right coverage in place. Amica will provide you with peace of mind. Go to amica.com and get a quote Today Is your schedule crazy? Just want some me time? Everyone could use a sanctuary from stress. Why not turn your bedroom into the space to decompress with the IKEA selection of comfortable beds, pillows, decor, mood lighting and so much more. Every time you step in there, it's nothing but me time. I mean, you time sounds like a dream, right? IKEA is here to make your me time dreams come true. Visit them in store or at ikea-usa.com sleep to create a comfy, blissful bedroom today. Pushkin Happy Valentine's Day. As promised, I have a lovely little treat for you on this most romantic occasion. Days in the last episode of the Happiness Lab, I chatted with relationship experts Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick to explore what rom coms get right and wrong about romance. But Eli and Paul have their own fabulous podcast. It's called Love Factually. And it just so happens that I recently joined them as a guest. So here's me and Eli and Paul talking about the science of one of my favorite ever rom coms, the Movie say Anything. I hope you enjoy our conversation and if you do, be sure to check out Love Factually wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:34]
Ben Walter
Welcome to Love Factually, the podcast that analyzes rom coms and romantic films using the science of close relationships. We're your hosts Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel welcoming in guest host of the Happiness Lab podcast, Dr. Laurie Santos. Thank you for joining us today.
- [02:53]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
- [02:55]
Ben Walter
So Laurie, tell us, what are we talking about today?
- [02:59]
Dr. Laurie Santos
So Today, we're talking about say anything, Cameron Crowe's 1989 rom com starring Psy John Cusack and Ione sky, which Entertainment Weekly ranked in 2002 as the number one romance movie of the past 25 years. Some of the themes we'll explore are how attachment bonds transfer from a parent to a romantic partner, the benefits of optimism, and what exactly counts as stalking and fair warning.
- [03:24]
Ben Walter
We'll be spoiling this movie today. So if you don't know how many songs one woman can write about Joe, and they're all about pain, pain, then go ahead and watch this movie and come back. Okay, Eli, tell us who are the key characters and couples in this movie.
- [03:41]
Jamie Dimon
The movie explores the love triangle involving Diane, her father Jim, and her boyfriend Lloyd. The story takes place during the summer after the young lovers graduate from high school. Diane, played by Ione Skye, is the unassuming valedictorian who will be leaving for a prestigious fellowship abroad at the end of the summer. Her peers view her as pretty and kind, but she's always been so busy that nobody really knows her. Jim, played by John Mullaney, is Diane's father. He and Diane's mother divorced five years earlier, after which Diane chose to live with him. His devotion to his daughter is boundless, but the methods underlying that devotion are sometimes dubious. Lloyd, played by Sigh John Cusack, is a principled slacker and a devoted brother and uncle. His best friends are Corey and D.C. both girls, and his primary passions are kickboxing and Diane. So, Paul, those are the chess pieces. Are you ready to give us one minute? And how the film moves them across the board.
- [04:47]
Ben Walter
Ready? Count me down. Here we go.
- [04:50]
Jamie Dimon
On your mark, get set and go.
- [04:55]
Ben Walter
Super achiever Diane Court delivers a graduation speech as Lloyd Dobler plots how to ask her out on a bona fide date. He wins her over by asking her to go with him to a graduation party and promising to give her all his English tips because she's moving to England in the fall for school. At the party, they orbit each other as Diane meets all the people she never got to know in high school, while Lloyd acts as kid. They become friends with potential and plan to hang out as much as they can over the next 16 weeks. Lloyd survives a family dinner at Diane's house. He visits the retirement home run by her father. He teaches her how to drive stick. They have sex in the backseat listening to Peter Gabriel. Diane's father becomes more and more disapproving of her relationship with Lloyd, and Diane ultimately relents. She breaks it off with Lloyd. Leading to eight unreturned phone messages and a boombox Peter Gabriel serenade outside her bedroom window. All this time, Diane's father has been lying to her about evading taxes. But the IRS closes in as she discovers her father's piles of cash. Diane confronts her father, she makes up with Lloyd, her father goes to prison. And Diane and Lloyd fly to England together as he promises her that everything will be okay once the smoking sign goes ding.
- [05:51]
Jamie Dimon
Ah, you did it.
- [05:53]
Ben Walter
Amazing.
- [05:54]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I was never gonna pull that off. I was gonna get so stuck on minute details of this film. But yes, amazing job, Paul.
- [06:01]
Ben Walter
Very challenging. Okay, well, Laurie, why don't you kick it off by telling us what is your relationship to this movie?
- [06:07]
Dr. Laurie Santos
So I saw this movie back in the 1980s when I was a kid myself. And interestingly, I just rewatched this movie with a friend from grad school and his now two 13 year old kids. And it was fascinating to kind of rewatch the film because probably I probably watched it around the time I was 13 if it kind of came out around 1988. So it was like a very strange full circle. But I kind of both identified with Lloyd as being this sort of like, kind but clueless, don't really know where you're going type person. And also Diane in the sense that she was like smart, not the pretty part. So I was kind of the like kind of unfortunate, not very cool, but also smart person. And so I like really wanted this couple to get together. And then I think like all women who watch this film back in the day, I just absolutely fell in love with Lloyd Dobler. Everyone wants their own Lloyd Dobler. Everyone wants the. No. And this, you know, Peter Gabriel serenade. Just the whole thing. So. So for me, when I think of like 80s Rom coms that make me smile and honestly that still hold up today, this is really one of them.
- [07:08]
Ben Walter
That's really cool. I do think that it felt like a permission structure to be a sensitive dude and that it. But that you could also kind of be admired for it at the same time. And I also really liked too how he seems to really be taken with Diane for many different reasons, but also in part that she's like a badass and killing it out there. Right. I mean, she's, you know, very smart and successful. And it's very clear that from the beginning he's like, wow.
- [07:36]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, Lloyd Dobler was like the OG like husband that's gonna support the woman's career.
- [07:41]
Jamie Dimon
Right?
- [07:41]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Like in the 80s when that wasn't so much of a thing. So, I mean, he's gonna give up, you know, his permanent kickboxing kind of teaching ship to fly to England with her to kind of help her out in her studies. Right. And so, yeah, aspirational.
- [07:54]
Ben Walter
Yeah, it's cool. Well, Eli, what about you?
- [07:56]
Jamie Dimon
You know, I connected a lot of different ways to this. One of them is when I. I've mentioned on this podcast a couple times that I acted in high school, and there's something in Evanston called the Piven P I V E N known like Jerry Piven's parent, Jeremy Piven's Parents Theater Workshop. So I took that when I was 16, and even then. So this was 1991, and, you know, famous alumni John and Joan Cusack, Jimmy Piven himself, like, a whole bunch of stuff like that. And when I took it, I took it with, you know, Martin Scorsese's daughter and then sort of had my first, you know, serious sort of girlfriend situation there.
- [08:30]
Dr. Laurie Santos
And was it Martin Scorsese's daughter? You could say no.
- [08:33]
Jamie Dimon
Oh, no, no. I did not date her. That would have been quite the story. It was not. But what's interesting is just proving that I never did grow up. I currently live one block from where that theater workshop is held.
- [08:47]
Ben Walter
Oh, no kidding. Yeah. Well, let's transition to talking about what this movie gets right, about the nature of close relationships, but also about the nature of happiness and optimism more generally. So, Laurie, do you want to kick it off for us?
- [09:01]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. So one of the reasons I love this film is I think it really does a nice job of showing the power of optimism. Right. So Lloyd is this, like, underachiever. Like, Diane Cort has no idea who he is, but he tells his friends, like, his two girlfriends, hey, I'm just gonna ask her out. And so Cory and D.C. are just like, no. Like, are you crazy?
- [09:23]
Jamie Dimon
She's a brain.
- [09:24]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Beautiful. What is it? She's the brain with the body of a game show host, and she doesn't know it. Right. And so they're like, she's just gonna destroy you, Lloyd. Like, don't do this. But Lloyd is just like, I'm gonna go for it. I'm just gonna ask her out. And as we see in the film, ultimately this works. And so this raises this interesting question about, like, is kind of believing you can succeed at something that seems incredibly unlikely. Good for you? Like, does it make it more likely that you're gonna succeed at the thing? And it turns out that there's some interesting psychology on this. There's this famous effect in psychology called the Roger Bannister effect, which for you runners out there, you might know that Roger Bannister is a famous British runner who originally was the first guy to run the four minute mile back in the day. And the deal with the four minute mile, I mean, I can't even barely run like a 10, 20 minute, 40 minute mile.
- [10:16]
Ben Walter
11:30 right here.
- [10:17]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, yeah. So, so like nobody had run the four minute mile before Roger Bannister, but, but importantly, no one thought anyone could. It was actually believed to be beyond like human capacity. Right. And, and so Roger's like, I'm going to run the four minute mile. And everyone's like, that seems crazy. But then there's one famous race in 1954, he ran it. But instantly what happened after that is people said like, oh, it is humanly possible we can run it. And just over a month later, somebody else ran the four minute mile. And now subsequently a four minute mile is not even anything for somebody who's a real runner to super brag about because so many people have kind of done this at this point. And so what does this mean? This means that Roger believing that it was possible to run the four minute mile when everyone else thought it was impossible. The idea is that his mental model of this made it easier for him to actually physically achieve this. Like it allowed him to engage in whatever behaviors he needed to do this. Like, you know, practicing or sort of pushing himself or whatever believing he could do it meant it made it easier for him to do it. And I think this is true for Lloyd too, right, to believe he had to do it. He had to call her up and you know, just be his normal kind of jovial kind, funny self, like a little self effacing. But like he just went for it and ultimately it worked.
- [11:29]
Ben Walter
That's great. I mean, what I love about the Roger Bannister idea vis a vis this movie is that we also see the inspiration for other people. And so there's this point at the party where Lloyd goes up to one of his friends, Mike Cameron, and is talking to him. And Mike Cameron says, I wanted to.
- [11:50]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Ask you, how'd you get Diane Court.
- [11:52]
Jamie Dimon
To go out with you? I called her up. But how come it worked?
- [11:56]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I mean, like, what are you? I'm Lloyd Dobbler.
- [12:03]
Jamie Dimon
This is great.
- [12:04]
Dr. Laurie Santos
This gives me hope. Thanks.
- [12:06]
Ben Walter
All right, so yeah, that, right, that quote right there.
- [12:09]
Dr. Laurie Santos
And Mike is basically every other runner like in the late 1950s who were like, oh, well, if your Roger Banister can do it, you know, Then the rest of us can do it too.
- [12:19]
Ben Walter
Eli, what do you got?
- [12:20]
Jamie Dimon
Oh, my God, Laurie, I'm so psyched you mentioned this movie. I had forgotten just how much is in here. And watching it from the perspective of relationship science was deeply enlightening. I'm going to start by talking about something that's a little obscure in the movie. And it points to this idea that I put a lot of stock in, that in a sense, social reality is reality, right? That basically things exist within our social consensus. And the line, Diane says this to her dad. She says, it always feels good to tell you the truth, because if I can't share it with you, it's almost like it didn't happen. It's such a great line. And going back into the 60s, these sociologists, Peter Berger and Hans Fried Kellner had this paper where they talked about the microsociology of knowledge. And really what they're talking about is this idea that the reality of the world is sustained in conversations with significant others. Now, this is one with her dad. But more recently, Maya Rossignac Malone and Tori Higgins have done research on this shared reality idea. And they talked about partners as making sense of the world together. And they have this line in one of their papers that I love, which is that humans are truth cartographers searching for epistemic companions with whom to map out the bounds of reality. And the movie, again, it focuses on a lot of things, but I think one of the lesser noticed aspects of what they're doing is they're playing in this space that yes, you can have these experiences, but until you've shared them with someone, they are not. And I love that about this film.
- [13:57]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Okay, Eli. But that raises an interesting question that's like shown in the title of the film. This idea of say anything, like, should we share all our realities with people? I have to say, again, rewatching this film with 13 year olds, the scene where Diane is telling her dad about having sex. Cause she's like, she comes home late after the whole sex in the car thing. And then she's like, okay, I just feel so sad I can't share this with you. So I'm just gonna go through it, dad. And she's just like, I attacked him. It was so great. You know, we had sex in the malib and the dad's face. And even these 13 year olds were like, something major has been violated there. This is a new, very much more sharing generation, I think, than like the generation like Diane came from. And so what does the science Say there is that right? Should we really be able to share anything? Is honesty and shared reality about every truth important for a relationship?
- [14:47]
Jamie Dimon
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Look. So I think there's two ways of engaging with that. Laurie, I love this question. The first one is about the shared reality aspect. And yes, I do think there's something realer about her having sex with Lloyd because. Because she shared it with her dad. So in that sense, I think this classic shared reality literature is correct. This question of discretion. Are there circumstances under which we shouldn't be sharing everything with everybody, even our close partners? I don't think the field has gotten into this enough, but I am persuaded that there are certain sorts of discretion, certain sorts of things that are probably best not shared in certain relationships. And it's true that Diane and her dad had a very close and special relationship bond. But in general, like details about one's sex life, sharing those with one's parents might be a little dubious on average, that would be my guess.
- [15:36]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, and even in the movie, right? I mean, there is this moment of, like, oh, my gosh, she's telling her dad that she just had sex. But I think it was in the context of her just saying, look, I'm willing to share everything with you, even the tough things. And I feel like that is actually an interesting message that, like, with. If we can't share our tough things with close others or controversial things, or, you know, sensitive things, like, who can we share them with? So.
- [15:58]
Jamie Dimon
So, Paul, I'm gonna throw it to you in a sec. Cause I know you also must have identified a million things. But, Laurie, on this idea of say anything and share everything. I think part of the title of the movie is really about her dad's lie. We haven't talked too much about it, but the whole conceit of their relationship is say anything. But meanwhile, he's been involved in this embezzlement fraud. And, you know, his motives are probably good. Maybe we'll touch on that. But she's deeply shaken by it. Idea of, like, social relationship partners as truth cartographers. I find it interesting what happens to her when she finds out she's deeply shaken. And what she says, she goes to Lloyd at that point and she says, my father's guilty. He lied to me. He lied to everybody. I just left home. I need you. And I think really what she needs is her reality. Her sense of reality is kind of shaken. And she's looking to him to find some sort of stability about the world. And I do think part of why she went back to him. Is this epistemic? The world isn't making sense. Please help. Motivation.
- [17:05]
Ben Walter
I think that actually leads into one of the other things that I think this movie gets pretty correct. And it is the attachment transfer that takes place as people age, as people grow up. Typically, for most adolescents, they will tell you that the people that they have the strongest attachment bonds with are their parents. And that includes various behaviors like, who do you want to be around? We call it proximity seeking.
- [17:32]
Jamie Dimon
Right.
- [17:32]
Ben Walter
But it's like, who do you want to be around? Who do you go to for support when you're feeling down? We call that safe haven. And then who do you go to for advice or to celebrate? And that we call the secure base. And usually the transfer kind of goes in that order as people move from having parents be their closest confidants to having romantic partners be their closest confidants. So first you want to spend all this time with a romantic partner, but you might still go to the parent for advice or for support. And then the support transfers. And finally, it's that advice component that moves over to the romantic partner. And I kind of see we. I think we witness her go through that process. And, Eli, that scene you were just describing, I think is the moment, the final moment, where she has the transfer complete.
- [18:22]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Although in her case, I worry that, like, the. Oh, she kind of does that transfer. But it really is, like, the only person that she ever talked to because she kind of didn't have friends in high school was the dead. And now it seems like the only person that she's talking to now is Lloyd, which, bracketed, might be a great person to talk to because Lloyd is kind and considerate and the best significant other out there ever. But it's still not. It's risky. It's still not really good. And I think even Lloyd recognizes this. At one point in the film, he asks this question. When she comes back to him, he says, do you need me, or do you just need somebody else? Right. And I think there's kind of an open. He doesn't actually even let her answer. He's like, never mind. I don't care. And he just calls her and kisses her. And the reunion is perfect. But I think it raises this question of, like, is this healthy that Diane is kind of transferring this attachment, but maybe not seeking out kind of help, support, safe havens, all these other things from just, like, other humans in her life?
- [19:15]
Ben Walter
Yeah. I mean, generally speaking, having a thin, rather than a more developed social network is not great for People. You want to feel like your little dyad is embedded in a set of other people who are all invested in helping your relationship to work. And so, you know, two people going off on their own. It's very romantic, but it's a little risky in the grand scheme of things.
- [19:43]
Dr. Laurie Santos
And it's an interesting contrast with how Lloyd Dobbler does it. Right. He. He's got Cory and dj, his close female friends to go to. He's got this close relationship with his sister, who's his actual sister in real life. Joan Cusack. Right. And her son. He just has this. He even has this bevy of dude friends at the Sip and Go that he goes to to talk to and get, like, relationship advice from. But I think there's a sense in which, like, Lloyd is healthier in part just because he has these other support systems to go to.
- [20:12]
Ben Walter
Yeah. Cool. Laurie, what else do you have about this movie? Other things this movie gets right.
- [20:18]
Dr. Laurie Santos
So. So another thing I think this movie gets right, or at least I really hope the relationship science bears out, and I hope it gets right, is this question of, like, who do you find attractive? Right. You know, Lloyd is this kind of, like, you know, underachiever. He just likes his kickboxing. He's kind of unremarkable. So unremarkable that when he first calls Diane, she actually pulls out her yearbook and starts flipping through to try to look at him and, like, look at his photo. She just. He's just not known to her. Right.
- [20:44]
Ben Walter
That's really funny.
- [20:46]
Dr. Laurie Santos
He's. But he's kind. She sees that kindness later, even on that short phone call when he's asking her out, he kind of makes her laugh, and she's into that. And it kind of raises this question, like, do we pick people based on, you know, just their looks, just their success criteria, what they're going to achieve in life, whether they're going to get some huge fellowship and be valedictorian, or do we pick people based just on how they make us feel? Right. They're kind to us. They make us laugh. They make us feel positive. And so my sense is that this movie is winning out according to the relationship science. But you two are the experts. What is the science?
- [21:19]
Jamie Dimon
Paul, you might have a thought or two on this one.
- [21:21]
Ben Walter
I'm glad you brought that up, Laurie. In fact, your hopes for the way attraction works are indeed true. That is very close to how people actually experience initial attraction, which is what I think is happening in that scene that you're describing. So there's this Classic study by Elaine Walster, then Walster, now Elaine Hatfield, conducted in the 1960s and it's affectionately called the Computer Dance Study. The idea was that these researchers, they brought a number of college freshmen together, set them up with each other, looked to see who, like whom. The lore of this study is that only attractiveness mattered, nothing else really mattered. The reality is they didn't like, have great measures of the other stuff. And even the measures they did have, it kind of worked. I think everybody was surprised that physical attractiveness was so potent. So when you look at contemporary speed dating data sets, yes, the appeal of attractiveness is very much present. It's very powerful. But so is confidence. That's also a huge effect size. Right. Then that's Lloyd in a nutshell. So is being funny, so is being nice and responsive. These are all positive, meaningful predictors. It is not the case that only attractiveness matters. All of those other features end up being important too. So I think you're spot on there.
- [22:45]
Dr. Laurie Santos
And I love how the movie just develops Lloyd's moral character over time. One of my favorite. You mentioned it in your quick summary. I was surprised I got in there. Paul. Especially effective summary was one of the first things that Diane learns about Lloyd is, at least at this party, he's the so called key master, which for those of you who may not remember 80s parties, is the person that gets to hold everybody's car keys and so that they don't necessarily drive home drunk. So Lloyd is sort of the evaluator of whether or not somebody is ready to drive home. And we see in the movie that this kind of comes to a head with one of the friends who comes up to him, is screaming at him and Lloyd is just like, you must.
- [23:22]
Jamie Dimon
Chill, you must chill, you must chill.
- [23:25]
Dr. Laurie Santos
You know, he doesn't give him the kids. But I think that's a moment for Diane to realize, like, oh, this person is responsible. You can be responsible outside of your academic pursuits, but this person is also kind of compassionate and kind. Like she's seeing all these like, great strengths that he has, not in the context of her relationship, but just kind of generally. Right. And I think that that must be a huge, I mean, it's a huge factor in why every teenage girl who watched this movie in the 80s fell in love with Lloyd Doppler. So it must be good for Diane too.
- [23:51]
Ben Walter
Yeah.
- [23:52]
Jamie Dimon
So on this, like, does the movie get the attraction right? It does so many different ways. So it also plays with some false myths that, you know, she might be out of his league. She's the brains with the body of. What did you say? The body of the game show hostess.
- [24:11]
Dr. Laurie Santos
The body of the game show hostess.
- [24:12]
Jamie Dimon
So she's out of his league. Also, brains stay with brains. So one is this idea of out of your league. The other is like, no, likes attract. Like. Like, what would she want with you? You sort of burn out, you know, kickboxer. And the movie basically puts the lie to all those sorts of things. Of course they're compatible because he's got these other qualities and they're attentive to each other and he makes her laugh. But one of the things that's interesting is we talk a lot about attraction on this show, especially with regard to similarity, right? So there's this conventional view, widespread, that we're attracted to people who are similar to us. Turns out, if you study that, we are attracted to people whom we think are similar to us. And you see this here a little bit because you see one of the reasons why this might emerge because there's this scene where she works at an old person's home, a retirement home, I'm not sure what they call it at that time. And she says to Lloyd, do you want to come by? And he's like, eh. And she says, you seem to have something against old people. And then he sort of says, well, no, I don't, but I kind of do because, you know, I used to work at a smorgasbord and the old people would flock there and they loved to eat and they just jammed their mouths, you know, they ate with their mouths open. And she says, I think that's ageism, and that's being prejudiced against people because they're old. Maybe their mouths don't work as well as yours. And he says, really? Well, you're really turning me around here. I was looking at it the wrong way, I think. And there is research on this concept called attitude alignment in close relationships. And this is work that my advisor, Carol Russbolt, was doing in collaboration with a student who was there with me named Jody Davis when I was in graduate school in the late 90s. But what they find in that space is that alignment is stronger to the extent that the issue is central to the other person. And clearly Lloyd's happy to recognize that Diane cares more about this than he does. And it's stronger to the degree that the relationship is important. And so what we see here is this will masquerade as. Look how much they have in common. They both love old people. But only because he basically tuned to her over Time. And so it feels like they have these things in common, but in reality they develop them together over time.
- [26:20]
Ben Walter
Yeah, I love that idea. It's also connected to one of the things that I really appreciated about this movie, which again, sort of this nice guy manifesto idea for how it can work. And I think it highlights the importance of having future female platonic friends. If you are a heterosexual man. And this is everywhere in the literature. So if you look, for example, at correlations between, like, hostile sexism and if you're a man having female friends, that's a meaningful negative correlation there. The more female friends you have, the less likely you are to endorse hostile sexism. These ideas of like, oh, women are out to get men, women are out to take advantage of men. Right. Things like this. And it's a simple intergroup contact story. We spend more time with people just getting to know them as people. And we have less of those really pernicious beliefs. Furthermore, having a bigger other gender network. And this is true for both men and women, heterosexual men and women, they're more likely to form relationships over a few year, period. This is also done on high school students. So I think we're really seeing that here, that these are good ways to be in the world. If you are a heterosexual man. So you're interested in women and you want to actually get to know women and ultimately date somebody that you're really into. This movie is pointing out one of the more effective ways to do that.
- [27:53]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Plus, the female friends are sometimes incredible songstresses.
- [27:57]
Ben Walter
That's right.
- [27:57]
Dr. Laurie Santos
We'll get to that later on as well.
- [27:59]
Ben Walter
Those songs were stuck in my head all day.
- [28:02]
Dr. Laurie Santos
The Jo Lies. Really?
- [28:06]
Ben Walter
They're so catchy. Why? No idea.
- [28:09]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, she should have went on to write commercial jingles. I hope that Corey did well in life. When you give that definition, it kind of sounds a little bit like the kinds of things that Lloyd's kind of male friends who he seeks out right after Diane breaks up with him. Some of the views they express about women. I think the most succinct one was the. The youngest member of the Sip and Go crew, which is just this little kid who's like, oh, my God.
- [28:32]
Ben Walter
Oh, my God. But another reason that I totally. I love that scene because again, it's all bearing down on exposing the lie of the. Of keeping the genders separate. And it's when Lloyd asked them, I got a question.
- [28:50]
Jamie Dimon
You guys know so much about women.
- [28:52]
Ben Walter
How come you hear it like a.
- [28:53]
Jamie Dimon
Gas and sip on a Saturday night, completely alone, drinking beers no women anywhere.
- [28:58]
Ben Walter
And they really have by choice. Yeah, right. Huh. Huh. So anyway, there you go.
- [29:07]
Dr. Laurie Santos
It points out. I mean, I wish Lloyd Dobler could, like, walk around and, like, go to every incel Reddit, like, thread and just walk in and ask the same Lloyd Dobler question to kind of break this up.
- [29:17]
Ben Walter
Seriously. All right, so tell us about some things that this movie gets wrong about the nature of close relationships. Either of you. What do you have?
- [29:28]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I just had something that the movie gets wrong generally, which is that kickboxing does not seem to be the sport.
- [29:33]
Ben Walter
Oh, no.
- [29:34]
Dr. Laurie Santos
See, notwithstanding. It just seems it was close but a little bit off. Okay, but that's not really relationship science. That's not really relationship science. One of the things I wanted to look at was this question of stalking. Yeah. Because I think this movie portrays a kind of strange version of it. It was definitely a version that, you know, I think based on all the memes that still exist now, like. Like 30 years later, like the holding up the boombox, which I was able to look up and is in fact a sharp GF76,000 boombox, just like old school, like, holding that up. And that is the purely romantic boombox. I think it's really hard to find them now. I mean, in part because it's not the 80s anymore, but I think people have bought them for this specific act of sort of copying Lloyd Doble. Right. That's a move that is iconic. It's on T shirts and memes, but it's also, like, borderline stalkery. And so, Paul, what is the movie kind of saying about stalkers?
- [30:37]
Ben Walter
And, yeah, so I felt that the movie kind of gives a pass to certain stalking behaviors. It treats it kind of romantically, kind of. I don't want to say a how to manual, but there's. There's. There's a couple of things happening. One, and I'll start with this, even though this really seems benign, are the eight phone messages right? Eight left messages? So there are studies that look at different forms of stalking, and leaving messages or unwanted phone calls are some of the most common ones. Those show the biggest discrepancy between what the person who is being left feels is likely to be unpleasant and what the person who is being stalked feels. People who are being stalked hate the phone messages. They. They really want them to stop. And the people leaving the phone messages are like, oh, whatever. I'm sure it didn't really bother them. They're really, really unpleasant. And so is showing up at somebody's house uninvited also not the kind of thing that most people look upon very favorably if they've broken up with somebody. I think that. I think that whole meme, the whole idea, like, rewatching it, I was like, oh, this is not what I remembered. I remembered something inspiring. Not like triumphant, but like, let's go. Let's defy your father. That is not what that scene is at all.
- [32:12]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. All the adults that I watch this film with remember the boombox scene as ending with Diane kind of rushing out. And that's when they made up. And, like, it kind of worked. And I was like, wait a minute. Of course it didn't work. He's just, like, creepily shooting, showing up with Spoonbox in the middle of the night.
- [32:28]
Jamie Dimon
Yeah. It would have been better if they'd had the scene where he got back into his car and drove home. That scene never made it into the movie.
- [32:35]
Ben Walter
Yes. Right.
- [32:36]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Where he thought really carefully and was like, maybe that was a little too much. Like, I should really respect Diana's. Yeah.
- [32:42]
Ben Walter
And so I actually want to give the movie credit for that. That it actually didn't show that working. Right. And that a number of other things have to transpire before she changes her mind. So it's more. I think that I'm critiquing the way the movie lodged itself in our collective memories. Contains some things that I think the movie didn't intend but aren't a very good idea.
- [33:09]
Jamie Dimon
Laurie, you're gonna regret that you ever chose to be on our show, but I have a question for you about this. So what does it mean to seduce someone? Like, what does seduction mean? If we stipulate that it isn't stuff like this. Right. If it isn't stuff like. Well, she wasn't sure. So I tried to be more charming. I did something innovative. I left a funny phone message or 8. And I agree that I don't think we really want these behaviors. Again, the movie gets away with it in a way. A lot of these old movies get away with it because she actually did want it. That's the thing that he can't know. And certainly she's not giving him reason to believe that she really wants it, but she did. And so it's sort of okay from our perspective, from the viewer's perspective. But, Laurie, do you have an opinion? Like, what would it mean to be interested in somebody, Be unsure whether that person is interested in you, and to try to persuade them that, you know, give me a try. Like, it'll be fun. And is it. If it isn't this if it isn't what Lloyd Dobbler did in this movie, like, what does it look like?
- [34:19]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, well, I think it is kind of what Lloyd Dobbler does. Not with the boombox part, but with the other parts. Right. It's really thinking from the other person's perspective about how to help them and what they need. Right. One of the scenes in the beginning that Diane Cord actually comments on to her dad later when she's like, well, here's why I fell in love with Lloyd was that they're just kind of walking around and Lloyd notices some broken glass on the ground. And you know, it's post party, so she's kind of walking around barefoot and he's like, no, no, let me just move that out of the way for you. Like, he's thinking about it from her perspective. He's kind of perspective taking, in that case, hopefully accurately, about what she really needs. And I think that's the spot where kind of seduction works best. Like when we're kind of perspective taking about what would help another person but then looking for signs of consent. Right. And that's the spot where I think the boombox is kind of on the borderline. But even Lloyd, again, I'm kind of defending him because he's Lloyd Dobler. And you know, how could I, like, you know, regret all the things I watched in the 80s and all these. But. But even then, he has this sign where people are trying to convince him to call her some more. I think it was his girlfriend trying to convince him to call him some more. And he says, I draw the line at 8, you know, answering messages. And to be fair, bracketed. I do think that, like, maybe it was okay to do a little more in the 80s just cause, like, sometimes the people were running for the phone. Like you didn't know when the cell phone goes to the message, they don't want to talk to you. But the answering machine, sometimes it's like the cord's really far away. They don't have any pocket, you know, so, but, but, but, but Lloyd is saying, I'm setting a boundary, right. I'm giving her a chance, but I'm drawing the line at eight home.
- [35:54]
Ben Walter
Yeah, he's persuaded to do that one last one and then we see, right, that she almost picks it up. So he gets an out from our perspective because we know what's going on a little bit behind the scenes.
- [36:05]
Dr. Laurie Santos
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- [38:42]
Ben Walter
So anything else about what this movie gets wrong about close relationships? Eli, what do you have?
- [38:48]
Jamie Dimon
Look, it mostly gets stuff right, but, you know, it makes some errors, like every movie. And one of them is, you know, a very forgivable error. But generally it's risky to make forever promises in the first weeks and months of a new relationship. And so the letter that he writes to her, right. Lloyd writes this letter to Diane after they have sex and he's really into her. And the letter in its entirety is, Dear Diane, I'll always be there for you. All the love in my heart, Lloyd. Now, I don't have a problem with Dear Diane or old, all the love in my heart or Lloyd. But I think the part when he says, I'll always be there for you, it's the always. Probably a bold commitment that he's actually, he's making a vow that he really is probably not in a position to make. And we do this, we do this a lot and it's desirable and we like it and we wanna feel this way. We stand up at our wedding vows and say, I will love you forever. These seem like high risk choices for somebody who takes seriously what the definition of a vow is. But I do think this is one of the cases where I just felt a little sheepish about suggesting that the really romantic thing to do is to tell somebody something that you really cannot, you probably cannot promise you're going to be able to deliver over time.
- [40:07]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. You forget when you see the movie because it seems like it's built over this whole, you know, two hour period. It's a little Romeo and Juliet. Right. You know, they've only really kind of hung out with each other for like a couple days really, you know.
- [40:20]
Ben Walter
Right. And you, and even, you know, it's over 16 weeks and now they are going to a foreign country together to presumably to live together. And that is pretty fast to jump into that level of commitment. And the movie clearly wants us to feel that, that we are witnessing a success story. I mean, you know, the ending, I love it. And I love the contrast with the Graduate. Right. That it's, you know, here are these two people embarking on this adventure and this one, we're supposed to be rooting for them and feeling like they've got it. But the reality is 16 weeks, that is quite a leap of faith to think that they've got it figured out at this point.
- [41:02]
Jamie Dimon
You know, Paul, it's interesting because I actually think this is the other thing that maybe the movie doesn't get right. And this depends on interpretation. But, like, what is the point of the ding on the airport? Like, this is literally the last thing that happens in the entire movie. It's obvious that this is supposed to be really significant.
- [41:18]
Ben Walter
It's so good, though. It's so good.
- [41:20]
Dr. Laurie Santos
So good, though.
- [41:22]
Ben Walter
It's amazing. Go ahead.
- [41:23]
Jamie Dimon
But there is a reading. There is a reading where you're basically like, the early parts of a relationship are turbulent. So again, just a reminder for people who haven't seen the movie this early, Diane is scared of flying, and Lloyd is with her on this flight. Literally the last scene in the movie, they're going to England for this fellowship that she has. And he says, like, if anything goes wrong, it's gonna be within the first five minutes. So you just have to make it to the ding. The airport, take off your seatbelt ding. I think it was the no smoking ding in the air.
- [41:53]
Ben Walter
It was the no smoking ding.
- [41:54]
Dr. Laurie Santos
It was the no smoking ding. Because everybody else on the plane is like, holding their pack of cigarettes shaking to try to wait till they can light one up, I think.
- [42:01]
Ben Walter
Right? The ding is light up.
- [42:02]
Jamie Dimon
It is basically light up.
- [42:03]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yes.
- [42:04]
Jamie Dimon
But either way, it could have been the seatbelt ding. And so one reading is that now they're through the turbulent time and we're witnessing like, the ding is like, and now it's smooth sailing. And if that is what Cameron Crowe intended, I think he's really guilty of the and they all lived happily ever after sort of thing. So I think that is my other concern about the movie is that if he was. Was implying something like that in the closing scene, that strikes me as wildly incorrect about what the next 60 years of that relationship might look like.
- [42:39]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Or the next, like, you know, four months to England and she starts studying and there's no kickboxing in all of London and et cetera, et cetera.
- [42:46]
Ben Walter
Right. And what exactly is he gonna do with himself? I think that's right. I think compared to some movies where they get together at the end and then we don't see anything about them encountering challenges, I think those versions are worse because we do see them overcoming some stuff here. But I hear you. As much as I love the way that whole ending is done, I get it that, you know, there are trials to come.
- [43:11]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Can I just. Can I just, like. Can I try out a. Like a more Empirically sane version. What if that whole plane flight, where there's a lot of turbulence, like an unusual amount of turbulence for, like, a plane taking off before the seatbelt date goes off, what if that is kind of a metaphor for, like, we're gonna go on this, you know, trip together? The long version of our life together is gonna have a lot of turbulence, but by holding each other's hand, we'll get through it and, you know, we'll kind of wait for the day, you know. What's. I don't know.
- [43:41]
Jamie Dimon
You know, what's funny about that, Laurie, is that that reminds me of the point you made earlier about the Social Network. Because his friends, he's got these two really close women friends, girlfriends, I guess, and they have also packed some stuff for this flight for them, right? They've packed some things to make sure. Like, I think they know that she's nervous about flying, and they're having this adventure together as a couple for the first time. And so those friends who are really invested in the relationship have packed for them some nice things for the trip. And that is, I think, hearkens back to, wow, they seem to have a pretty good foundation for a lot of what they might be going through next.
- [44:16]
Ben Walter
That's cool. It's like a wedding thing, right? It's like, you know, you get everybody together to sort of give you well wishes on your way.
- [44:24]
Jamie Dimon
I object.
- [44:28]
Ben Walter
So are we okay with this? Anything in this movie raise moral quandaries or other concerns? Other things age badly. What does everybody have here?
- [44:38]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Well, I could say what was interesting is that, as I mentioned, I watched it with 2 20, 2413 year olds, and they genuinely really liked the film. They had two things that were kind of funny, and maybe this is that they were a little young. One was that, well, first of all, we were watching with their dad, and so they really didn't like the sex scene. They were just like, oh, God, they're kissing. Why are they under the blanket? Why is he shaking? Like, they just literally couldn't handle that. But the second thing was that they were really confused when Diane broke up with Boyd.
- [45:06]
Ben Walter
Huh.
- [45:07]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Where they're like, but she doesn't think that. Why is she saying that? She doesn't think that? And they kind of just, like, couldn't get it. Like, they kind of couldn't handle her kind of confusion based on what was going on with her dad, of sort of stepping away. And they're like, but she doesn't think that, right, they're gonna get back together. Right. Like, they kind of were seeing. And so maybe this is the current generation having a hard time with like, you know, tough emotions or complicated conflict in the film. But they had a really tough time.
- [45:31]
Ben Walter
That's really interesting.
- [45:32]
Jamie Dimon
You know, one of the things that was really eye opening about watching it again and here. Laurie, thank you again for recommending this one. It was just a delight. Is it's not just a movie for kids. That was something that I think you're describing here, like the 13 year olds didn't get it. But also, as somebody who is now a dad, I'm actually a dad of a teen girl and I just thought a whole lot more about the dad daughter dynamic. And the truth is I at the top called this like a love triangle. I don't think that's the standard way people think about this movie, but I do think that's what's happening is that these are two men who are deeply in love with obviously there's nothing sexual with her dad, of course, but deeply in love with her, that she is going to be somewhat or to a significant degree the center of their lives. And she's trying to balance that. And she feels awkward about this time that she's spending with Lloyd given that she's going away. And she feels like maybe she should be with her dad. And so I think there is like a sophistication, an adultness of this teen romance that you almost never get in a teenage. And I think that's why part of the reason why I think the 13 year olds didn't get it is she feels this strong sense of obligation to her dad and doesn't know how to fit Lloyd into that schema and therefore ends up playing around for a while with breaking up with him in a way that doesn't make sense for her feelings for Lloyd, but isn't crazy from the perspective of the various emotional forces that are buffeting her.
- [46:59]
Ben Walter
One of the things that I flagged as being a little bit that sort of age badly or age strangely about this movie is in the same category. And I'll pose this in the form of a question. Did some Gen Xers think this was a parenting manual? That the way to parent is to really push your kid as much as possible, cut them off from socialization when they are are when they are in high school? Again, I think this is sometimes a stereotype of Gen X contemporary parenting rather than the reality. But I do think there is much more pressure today to achieve, achieve, achieve for people in high school that people like Diane Court are very common These days, right. She was the one person in her high school, and now this is a thing. And so I wonder how many people saw this movie and thought, like, that's how I'm going to treat my daughter.
- [47:58]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Parenting 101 and tax fraud. But I mean, apart from the tax fraud. No, I mean, Paul, I think you're really onto something, right? Like, if we look at the current generation of teenagers, right, the 13 year olds I was watching this with, this is the loneliest generation in history. Since we've been measuring loneliness in teenagers, they're also the most academically busy, like, the most academically striving. If we just like, look at just sheer amounts of homework, those things have gone up since the making of this film. And beyond that, we see, like, the seeds of the fact that they're kind of like Diane, like, shifting away from these sort of dating relationships, right? Like the fact that, like, modern teenagers are having less sex than teenagers have ever had back in the day. And so you might be kind of onto something where the sort of Diane Court School of Child rearing was, like, kind of coming up a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Another thing that the kiddos picked up on is that Lloyd does this lovely thing where he's the key master and he's taken everyone's keys. But then when his job is over, he's like, hand me a beer. And he then proceeds to drive home with the beer. Even the 13 year olds were like, wait a minute, I thought we weren't drinking and driving. You're on duty, man. Good point.
- [49:08]
Ben Walter
Yeah, that's great. Relationship quotes. We've hit a few good ones already. But do either of you have any other quotes that we should clip in here and talk about?
- [49:20]
Dr. Laurie Santos
So mine is kind of a funny one. And it gets back to this idea that, like, these are teenagers who are acting in the film that we're trying to identify with, but the film is actually written by adults. At a few points, I think you hear the adult voice kick in. And so this was a quote that happened just after Lloyd has sex with Diane. And he's meeting up with his friends and they're trying to suss out, oh, did you have sex or did you have sex? Look at his face.
- [49:45]
Ben Walter
He did the deed.
- [49:47]
Jamie Dimon
You're an inspiration, Lloyd.
- [49:48]
Dr. Laurie Santos
You should go on the 700 Club or something. All right, all right, all right.
- [49:52]
Jamie Dimon
Calm down. All right, calm down.
- [49:53]
Ben Walter
Nothing's different.
- [49:54]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Lloyd, listen to me. Everything has changed.
- [49:58]
Ben Walter
You've had sex. No matter what you might think, nothing.
- [50:01]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Will ever be the same between you two. You might be 60, you might be walking down the street and you'll talk to her about something, whatever, but what you'll really be thinking is we had sex. And that struck me as like, interestingly, like, it struck me as the kind of case that you couldn't know that unless you were like, you know, in your 40s or 50s. Like, like. I just didn't think any 19 year old be thinking back that that's that.
- [50:28]
Ben Walter
Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes Corey in particular has a wisdom beyond her years.
- [50:32]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Beyond her years.
- [50:33]
Jamie Dimon
It was somewhere between the 53rd and the 54 fourth song she wrote for Joe that she just developed life's wisdom, I think.
- [50:40]
Ben Walter
I wonder if that tape is like on the Internet somewhere. If we can buy, like. If somebody has like cobbled together all of those clips and somehow created something.
- [50:51]
Dr. Laurie Santos
And then we can ultimately play it on a sharp GF7 box.
- [50:56]
Ben Walter
I love it. All right, any other quotes?
- [50:59]
Jamie Dimon
Yeah, there's one other thing I love. He left those seven voicemails and then on the eighth and final voicemail, he says, pick it up.
- [51:07]
Dr. Laurie Santos
You know what's best?
- [51:07]
Jamie Dimon
I've been thinking, maybe I didn't know you. Maybe you're a mirage.
- [51:10]
Ben Walter
Maybe the world is a blur of.
- [51:11]
Jamie Dimon
Food and sex and spectacle and everyone's just hurtling towards Necropolis, in which case it's not your fault. You know, maybe it's a good side to all this.
- [51:17]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I don't know.
- [51:17]
Jamie Dimon
I've been thinking about these things. The reason I love that is because it ties back a little bit to this, like, Truth Cartographers. He's like really thrown at the dissolution of the relationship and he doesn't really make. He's not really able to make sense of. Maybe you were just a mirage. It's all sort of confusing. And this is a pretty common reaction in the wake of a breakup is we lose a little bit of our sense of order, our sense of structure, our sense of who we are. And I think this quote, this last eighth and final voicemail he leaves for her, I think really captures the essence of this idea that it can be bewildering, it can be confusing to end a meaningful relationship. And he's just struggling to make sense of it.
- [51:58]
Ben Walter
Yeah, that is one of the hardest things that people have to do to get over a breakup is to make sense of it and develop that narrative. So what do we wish we knew about close relationships or any other psychological phenomenon? You know, questions that this movie poses that we don't have great answers to yet?
- [52:18]
Jamie Dimon
How should we act when we are Suspicious of a loved one. So at first, Diana is convinced that there's no way her father did anything wrong. She goes to the IRS and says, stop it, you've got the wrong guy. And he's like, no, we don't. He's guilty as sin. And then gives her enough reason to believe, like, oh, maybe he did this. So what does she do? She snoops. She looks through his drawers. She eventually unlocks something private, and then eventually discovers, uh, oh, there's a bunch of, like, $100 bills here that shouldn't be here. And I just don't have a sense of how people generally behave when they become a little suspicious. I don't know, is he getting text messages from that girl? I sort of think maybe. Is that an excuse? Is that something that people use to say, okay, well, I'm gonna break into his email or his texts and try to find out what's going on? When do people do that? When do they start acting like private detectives? Under what circumstances is it ethical to do those things? I just don't think we know that much about that.
- [53:18]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Well, this is a spot where, at least in 2024, I peeped. Feel like people crowdsource this a lot. I'm not sure if you all are fans of Am I overreacting on Reddit, but I think that this would be like a classic Am I overreacting on Reddit where it's like, my dad, you know, the IRS is investigating my dad for nursing home tax fraud, and I saw some money, like, in his private chamber. Am I reacting? But I think that is something we can do, right? I mean, I think not necessarily on Reddit, but we can go to our close others and ask the question, like, can you give me some advice here? Like, does this make sense? And again, this gets back to the kind of thing you were talking about earlier, Eli, right? Where we're looking for truth seeking, right? We're trying to figure out is my. Like, if you have that reality, just privately, it's hard to kind of know. But with getting some other folks opinions on things, all of a sudden we can know, am I just being paranoid or is this kind of a real situation that we need to pay attention to in more detail?
- [54:11]
Ben Walter
I feel like one thing we talk about a lot on this show is the, like, motivated reasoning and close relationships. And we have all these biases about our close others. We just want to believe what we want to believe. And it is also important to realize that sometimes those beliefs cannot be sustained in light of reality. Reality is still A thing. And at some point you have to confront that. And so going to other relationships, I mean, that kind of social proof is a good way to do that. For me, the thing that this movie pointed out that I loved but also thought like, oh, I wish we studied attraction like this more. And it is the nature of their first date, right. That they go to this. I'm not talking about whatever the thing was at the mall. That doesn't count, right? That doesn't count. When they go to the party and they're like kind of interacting, but they're also watching each other interact with other people. Right. This is in many ways what dating kind of used to be. It was about social networks. You're getting to know each other, but other people are floating in and out of the conversations at the same time. And this is how we see if there's a connection with somebody else. And I wonder if we've really lost something as we transition to the resume version of dating where you sit down, cross from somebody and I talk and you talk and I talk and you talk and we exchange statistics and we hope that something clicks. And I think we really missed something by not having these kinds of dates. There was something really special about this idea that they are on a date and they're only interacting for a fraction of the time. Like, what a cool idea this is. And, you know, I wish this wasn't so much a bygone era.
- [55:58]
Jamie Dimon
Totally.
- [55:58]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Okay, here's one that I got interested in. But it might just be how the Lloyd Dobler relationship situation maps on to my own love life right now. And so there's this open question about whether or not Lloyd and Diane got together at the right time. Right. Clearly they went to high school for three years together. Yeah, they had this weird three year high school where they had the. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So freak. That was another thing. The third teacher was like, what? They only went to school for three years. Like, yeah, it's big, mind blowing for them. But clearly Diane and Lloyd overlapped for three whole years. Clearly there was lots of parties he could have invited her to. It's after graduation. She's only got like a couple weeks left before she skedaddles off to the UK for her fellowship. Was that the right time to kind of get together? You know, should he have done it sooner? Is there something special about a relationship that begins when it doesn't have much time? And the reason I like this question is that my husband and I got together right after I found out that I was getting A job at Yale, and I was about to move there in a couple weeks time. We had almost exactly the 16 weeks that Diane and Lloyd had when we found out.
- [57:04]
Jamie Dimon
I've always wanted to be in New Haven.
- [57:07]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I think he super didn't think that.
- [57:09]
Ben Walter
Maybe he had tips.
- [57:10]
Dr. Laurie Santos
He had tips for New Haven? Yeah, no, he didn't think that. He didn't think that. But you know, I think that in some ways it was. In some ways at the time it felt like, oh, there's no pressure to this. We can just kind of get to know each other and enjoy it. Because it would be silly to think that the end of this has to result in, you know, him hopping on a plane to New Haven till, you know, the turbulence causes the ding or I guess a car version of that or whatever. And I've wondered, like, is there data on that? Was that a good thing? It was a good thing for me. It seems like it was a good thing for Lloyd and Diane. Although, as we've talked about, we don't know what happened afterwards is the preciousness of the little time and the fact that we can't think of this as a long term thing because there's some other constraints. Does that help things or hurt things?
- [57:52]
Ben Walter
It's fascinating. You know, we don't study this all that well. You're right. There's this phenomenon of on again, off again relationships. And the general idea is that some relationships have more of this turbulence, this turnover, than other relationships do. And they generally tend to have a number of other features that are less than optimal. But I don't think there's good work looking at the situational forces that might set people up well when they start a relationship or set people up poorly. Other than some of the social network stuff, there really isn't that much out there. But it would be really interesting to look at something as simple as how much time will we be in the same place? And to see what kind of effect that has.
- [58:41]
Jamie Dimon
Yeah, you know, there's not much in terms of the situations that set you up well. But it occurs to me there's another way of thinking about this question, which is are there circumstances that will supercharge the pace of a romantic connection regardless of the long term future? And Paul, you and I talk sometimes about Art Aaron's fast friends procedure. You ask increasingly intimate questions or you look into each other's eyes for three consecutive minutes. Right. There's. There's these procedures. My guess, Laurie, is that what I think of as like the summer camp romance thing. This idea that there's an end date. My guess is that that is in some ways a disinhibitor. And I wish the field knew more. My guess is that there is probably like a typology or a category of disinhibitors, things that make us willing to get vulnerable and intimate quickly. And so, yes, my guess is that. Is that knowing that we've only got X number of weeks or X numbers of months will do that. And then the interesting question is, okay, well, if you have supercharged the intimacy, under what circumstances does that intimacy last? For a long time, possibly even forever. And that is something that I'm pretty sure we know nothing about.
- [59:51]
Ben Walter
That's really cool. So it's like, well, this relationship has a certain amount of intimacy potential. And if you give us, you know, four days, we're gonna. We're gonna. We're gonna get it all. Yeah, that's really.
- [60:03]
Dr. Laurie Santos
And you all have talked about cases like this, like Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, these other movies where you have these kind of short periods of supercharging relationships. I wonder if these factors play out.
- [60:14]
Ben Walter
Right, that the ticking clock could in fact be an accelerant in some cases. And I think we see it in those movies. And yeah, you're right. I think we see it here, too, in some ways, in a more realistic way. Sixteen Weeks would be a more common, hypercharged romance than those movies where it's happening in a matter of hours.
- [60:34]
Jamie Dimon
Yeah.
- [60:35]
Ben Walter
So we rate movies on this podcast from one to five stars. So let's all go through and talk about how many stars we give this movie. Laurie, I will throw to you first. How many stars do you give? Say anything.
- [60:50]
Dr. Laurie Santos
100 million stuff notion. Look, I chose this one because it's. That's a favorite. Lloyd Dobler. Swoon. Swoon. Wait, what's my top stars? 4?
- [61:01]
Ben Walter
5? 5? You can go as high as five stars.
- [61:04]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Sorry. Yeah, yeah. So I love this movie. Lloyd Dodler. Swoon. It's gotta be five stars for me.
- [61:10]
Ben Walter
Okay. And Eli, how many stars for Sandy?
- [61:13]
Jamie Dimon
5, and only because I can't take all the 500 million or whatever it was. I knew that I liked this movie. I didn't really remember just how great it was.
- [61:24]
Ben Walter
We're gonna make this a hat trick. Five stars from me as well. What a man to have as a role model. John Cusack. Thank you. Right. I mean, we talk about the bad messages from 80s movies, and this was the antidote. Came along in 1989 and cleaned the slate. We also rate movies on Rustbolts now. The Rustbolt is named after Eli's advisor, the late, great Carol Russ Bolt, pioneer of close relationships research. With five stars indicating a near perfect depiction of the nature of close relationships. I'll go first on this one. This movie gets four rust bolts from me. I think it got a lot of things right. A lot of the things that we covered here today, a few things that I thought were the reason it doesn't go all the way to Five rust Bolts for me is really just that stalking component. I think it somehow lodged in our memories as. As endorsing or maybe excusing some things that we'd call stalking today. But overall, four rust bolts for me. Eli, what about you?
- [62:26]
Jamie Dimon
I have this at Five rust bolts too. I mean, I had a list of, I think, 11 different things that I thought the movie got right. We talked about some of the bigger ones, but I was floored by the level of insight that Cameron Crowe had when writing this and also by the delivery from these particular actors. I thought it was just great and illustrated. Exactly. I think a lot of how relationships work.
- [62:52]
Ben Walter
Yeah. And Laurie, what about you? What do you think?
- [62:54]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I gotta go with like four and a half rust bullets. Like Paul, I share your intuition that the stalking stuff just had me a little bit more skeeved out when I rewatched it. That was probably because One of the 13 year olds I watched with a boy named Max just at the end of the film, took his iPhone on speakerphone and played Peter Gabriels in your eyes. Like, standing there looking for Lord. And I was like, no, that wasn't the one message you took.
- [63:18]
Ben Walter
No, no, it was. It was a desperate, desperate moment.
- [63:22]
Dr. Laurie Santos
So I'm gonna knock it down 0.5. But yeah, I mean, I share Eli's intuition too, that, like, this movie got a lot of stuff right for the 80s.
- [63:30]
Ben Walter
It really did. Well, this is all the time we have for today. This has been the Love Factually podcast and we have been delighted to have as our special guest, Dr. Lori Santos, host of this Happiness Lab podcast. So, Lori, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [63:47]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Anytime. I'm ready to come back whenever you need. We are likely to take you whenever you need. An expert on bad 80s movies, I am here.
- [63:54]
Ben Walter
Let's do it. Let's do it. Or good ones, for that matter. All right, well, that is all we have for you today. And I look forward to doing this with both, both of you at some time in the future.
- [64:07]
Jamie Dimon
The Love Factually podcast is produced and edited by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel, featuring music from Andrew Fraker and Sons.
- [64:25]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Teets and Watson's been making meats and cheeses the right way since forever. What's that mean?
- [64:30]
Ben Walter
It means never cutting corners. Ever.
- [64:32]
Jamie Dimon
It means cooking, not processing.
- [64:34]
Ben Walter
It means our Virginia brand ham that's.
- [64:36]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Cooked to perfection, then twice baked to layer the flavors.
- [64:40]
Ben Walter
It takes more time, but you can taste the difference.
- [64:43]
Dr. Laurie Santos
We come to work every day to.
- [64:44]
Jamie Dimon
Do it the right way, even if.
- [64:46]
Dr. Laurie Santos
It'S the hard way. Because if it's not right for us, it's not right for you. Dietz and Watson It's a family thing since 1939 with Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford at the Center Stanford Medicine Children's Health is ranked as one of the top children's hospitals in the nation by U.S. news & World Report. As one of the few healthcare systems in the country dedicated exclusively to pediatric and obstetric care, they have an unwavering commitment to caring for babies, kids and expectant mothers. Their exceptional care teams have developed treatments that have led to successful outcomes for many children with complex cases that could not be resolved elsewhere. Learn more at stanfordchildrens.org American Military University understands the unique challenges of military life. Founded with roots in the military, AMU was built to serve service members, but it's open to anyone who values flexible, high quality education. Whether you're managing a PCs, preparing for deployment or balancing a busy family life, AMU's online programs make it possible to work towards earning your degree wherever life takes you. For active duty service members and their families, AMU offers the Preferred Military rate, which lowers the cost of undergraduate and master's levels programs to just $250 per credit hour. And as the number one provider of education to the US military and veterans using their GI Bill benefits, it's clear AMU is a university committed to honoring service with savings. So when you're ready to take the next step towards your education goals, AMU is here to help. Visit AMU APUS Edumilitary to learn more. American Military University Honoring Service with Savings.